THOR 2.0: Major Improvements to the Open-Source General Circulation Model

Abstract

THOR is the first open-source general circulation model (GCM) developed from scratch to study the atmospheres and climates of exoplanets, free from Earth- or Solar System-centric tunings. It solves the general non-hydrostatic Euler equations (instead of the primitive equations) on a sphere using the icosahedral grid. In the current study, we report major upgrades to THOR, building upon the work of Mendon\c{c}a et al. (2016). First, while the Horizontally Explicit Vertically Implicit (HEVI) integration scheme is the same as that described in Mendon\c{c}a et al. (2016), we provide a clearer description of the scheme and improved its implementation in the code. The differences in implementation between the hydrostatic shallow (HSS), quasi-hydrostatic deep (QHD) and non-hydrostatic deep (NHD) treatments are fully detailed. Second, standard physics modules are added: two-stream, double-gray radiative transfer and dry convective adjustment. Third, THOR is tested on additional benchmarks: tidally-locked Earth, deep hot Jupiter, acoustic wave, and gravity wave. Fourth, we report that differences between the hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic simulations are negligible in the Earth case, but pronounced in the hot Jupiter case. Finally, the effects of the so-called "sponge layer", a form of drag implemented in most GCMs to provide numerical stability, are examined. Overall, these upgrades have improved the flexibility, user-friendliness, and stability of THOR.